Who made the great advances?

Western civilization has proven the most magnanimous, generous, toletant, and altruistic in the long run, and I fear that may be our undoing. We were the first to outlaw slavery, previously a rather ubiquitous institution, and because we broadcast the message that slavery is wrong, it invited other, less scrupulous cultures to castigate us for it.

The simple fact of the matter is that Western civilization is responsible for the vast majority of scientific, technological, and philosophical discover and creativity. But we have also proven the most tolerant of other cultures, inviting them to share in our abundance, at the expense of our own well-being. We now allow those cultures to dictate terms to us, and we openly defer to peoples who, prior to contact with the West, often barely had two sticks to rub together.

I'm not saying that there is nothing that we can learn from other cultures, just that there is a reason why the rest of the world adopted more from the West than we have from them, and that is for a very good reason: people choose the best solution.

To emphasize the point, consider Native Americans, who were, prior to Europeans' arrival in North America, a smattering of Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Age cultures. So many of them claim to have been eradicated by whites, or to have been forced to intermarry, yet the simple truth of the matter is much simpler: hypergamy. Marrying "up." When faced with the choice between living in a tent and burning buffalo dung for fuel versus living in a house on a farm and having abundant food and the best technology, guess which one many of them chose? That's the reason why, if you add up the number of 1/8th Cherokees and 1/16th Arapahos and 1/4 Iroquois, and add them to the number of full blooded natives, the number of Native Americans is not only higher today than it ever was, but is hugher than the number that could ever have been sustained by their lifestyle.

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Who made the great advances?